Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced a proposal to help new teachers repay their student loans during his State of the City speech in January.

New York City schools are recruiting teachers by dangling $25,000 to pay off student loans, even though the teachers union hasn’t agreed to the program yet.

In an online job posting, the city’s Department of Education is touting the new incentive, emphasis included in original:

As a New York City teacher, you may be eligible for additional income through a wide array of incentives and school positions that will stretch and challenge you as an educator as well as offer additional compensation. For example, Mayor Bloomberg recently announced that top tier graduates may be eligible for a total of $25,000 toward student loan repayment.

While the United Federation of Teachers supports the program, the union said it would have to be negotiated if the city used public money for the loan repayments — and that hasn’t happened yet.

“Maybe they’re mentioning the potential student loan forgiveness because they’ve figured out that the release of the [teacher rankings] hasn’t been a big plus for their recruiting,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in a statement, referring to test-based performance rankings released for the first time last month.

The union said negotiations are ongoing, but a department official said the union was stalling.

“The teachers union can try to distract New Yorkers with other issues, but it is inexcusable that the UFT would hold up a program that would provide loan forgiveness to outstanding students who decide to devote themselves to a career of teaching,” David Weiner, a deputy schools chancellor for labor, said in a statement.

Mulgrew shot back: “The DOE statement reflects a touching concern for incoming teachers. But it is a little hard to believe its sincerity when it comes from an organization that just sabotaged its own recruiting efforts by attempting to shame thousands of new and veteran teachers with the public release of the flawed [teacher rankings].”

A Department of Education official said the offer was included in the advertisement after potential job candidates began asking about the program after the mayor’s speech.

The loan-repayment proposal was one of the less controversial proposals in a speech that largely focused on education. Bloomberg also used the speech to announce he would close and quickly re-open 33 schools after re-branding them and replacing about half the staff.

The union strongly opposes another Bloomberg proposal hinted at in the job posting: a $20,000 permanent merit-pay raises to teachers who receive top evaluations for two years in a row under a new statewide teacher-rating system.

Though the mayor and members of his administration have referred to Washington, D.C.’s merit-pay program as a model that helped retain great teachers, officials there said it was too early for the program to show evidence that it worked.

It’s unclear how many New York City teachers would receive the top rating two straight years, so it’s difficult to estimate the cost, department officials have said. Under a similar rubric used to make tenure decisions last year, 17% of teachers up for tenure were rated highly effective for that single year.